Reversal is complete: Republicans are the working-class party

Washington: The differences couldn’t have been starker. She’s the child of immigrants; he spews debunked conspiracies about cats and dogs. She wants to restore women’s reproductive rights; he’ll let the states further erode them. She’s a new generational leader; he’s been campaigning for nine tumultuous years.

But while millions of Americans decided long ago what they thought of Donald Trump, about half the country is clearly unwilling to turn the page on the incendiary Republican.

Votes were still being counted – including in the critical Midwest battlegrounds of Wisconsin and Michigan – but Kamala Harris’ path to victory was all but gone.

Donald Trump smiles at an election night watch party at the Palm Beach Convention Centre in the early hours of Wednesday.Credit: AP

By the time her campaign spokesman, Cedric Richmond, informed her watch party in Washington that she would not be speaking at the event but would return the next day when there was a clearer result, Trump had retained North Carolina for the third consecutive time, won back Georgia, and Republicans had also secured control of the Senate with crucial wins in Ohio, West Virginia and Nebraska.

In another big victory, Trump easily won Iowa, too – three days after Ann Selzer, one of the most respected and accurate pollsters in the country, found him trailing Harris by 3 points.

“WINNING!” he posted immediately.

Vice President Kamala Harris phone banks with volunteers at the DNC headquarters in Washington on election day. Credit: AP

Early signs suggested that Trump’s core constituency of white, working-class voters in rural America showed up in force. But so too, it seems, did a broader coalition of voters: black voters, Latinos and young men drawn by the notion that their lives were better during Trump’s first term.

Indeed, if the results thus far reinforced anything, it’s the realignment of the Republicans as a party that appeals to the working class while the Democrats have increasingly become a party of college-educated, upper-income suburban voters, especially women.

It also reinforces the fact that, at its core, this was an election in which most of the country was broadly unhappy with the course it was on and wanted change.

Harris had framed herself as the agent of that change, but as part of Biden’s administration of the past four years, many Americans simply didn’t buy it.

One of her most damaging moments was when she was asked on the talk show The View whether she would have done something differently than Biden over the past four years.

“There is not a thing that comes to mind,” she replied, handing Trump one of his most effective attack ads.

The vice president is yet to concede defeat, but Trump’s performance was enough to trigger Democrats still traumatised from 2016, when another woman, Hillary Clinton, unexpectedly lost.

Many of those Democrats had gathered at Howard University, Harris’ alma mater, to see what they hoped would be the first woman ushered into the Oval Office. But as a chill hit the air in Washington, so too did the tension.

When Richmond came out to inform the crowd they wouldn’t hear from their candidate immediately, what began as a celebration on the college lawn turned into an anxious wait.

“We will continue overnight to fight to make sure that every vote is counted, that every voice has spoken,” Richmond assured them.

It’s an extraordinary comeback for Trump. After all, here’s a man who has been convicted of falsifying business records, encouraged an attempted coup in the US Capitol, uses increasingly fascist rhetoric, and still denies the results of the 2020 election, getting a second chance at power.

For much of the campaign, Trump conveyed a bleak message of racism, misogyny, grievance and fear. But clearly, America is a country willing to elect someone who upends norms because they are deeply unhappy with the status quo.

When he asked at his rallies the question: “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” The answer, for many, was a categorical no.

This was always going to be a challenging campaign for Harris. She entered the race about 100 days ago, whereas Trump has been running since 2015. She faced ongoing anger over the war in Gaza, flip-flopped on policy and struggled to differentiate herself from Biden, unable to find the balance between loyalty and necessary distance.

But Harris also ran an incredibly expansive get-out-the-vote effort. Indeed, in one week alone, the campaign logged 600,000 doorknocks and made 3 million phone calls. She built a coalition that stretched from independent senator Bernie Sanders on the left to Republicans Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney on the right.

And her potent message about abortion resonated with millions of American women – many of whom now fear for their reproductive health.

However, in the end, it wasn’t enough. The highest, hardest glass ceiling that Hillary Clinton failed to smash remains unbroken.

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